A History of the Golden Seed

Posted on May 30, 2014 by janeadamsart

Lily of the field, and tower of alchemy

This post is a concluding chapter from the book “Manishya – On Being Human” which my friend Actaeon and I wrote and illustrated together, a few years ago.

I like to see Kabbalah and Alchemy in the historical context because – for any whose interest it quickens – it is your/our history, the recurrent surfacing of our threads of life in the broad human tapestry.

Crossroads: The Mandala of the Star, Cross and Crescent

Star Cross Crescent with Omkara of the east

SOME HISTORICAL CROSSINGS OF THE GOLDEN SEED

OUR THEME includes Christ’s parable of the Talents, any talent or potential in Reality.

In the New Testament story, (Luke, 19) three stewards were given each a talent or treasure to look after while the King was away. The first one invested his, and with it made ten more; the King on his return, rewarded his trust. The second steward made five talents and was also rewarded, but the third hid his away safely in a piece of cloth. He felt the King was a hard man who took out what he did not put in, and reaped what he had not sown. The King replied, “Take his one talent from him and give it to the one who has ten.”

In other words, the Talent is the sowing and harvesting of a golden seed. From the golden seed we grow our White Roses of forgiveness and vitality. We dare to be wise, to know, and to create.

profiles welcome across time

In 2014, we don’t have to be tourists to enter our own sacred space and bring heaven to earth down the lightning-flash.

labyrinth in apothecary’s garden

The Knights Templar were lightning-conductors. They opened a road for the pilgrim between light and darkness. Their art transforms night into light, and in their cathedrals the Christ was uncrucified, like risen bread.

But their Order was powerful, and was feared and destroyed by the Church, though their buildings of the sanctuary still stand. A century after Chartres, the last of the Knights were hunted down by a pair of popes, and burned alive. The popes survived them by barely a year. Then the plagues attacked the body and fabric of genetics, society and politics, fracturing and fragmenting space and time. There was a charnal, collective shock in medieval Europe. From this compost grave, a flower of Renaissance would arise.

Botticelli’s Aphrodite on the wave, a body of light, is beautiful to touch and see.

Aphrodite, after Botticelli (1992)

We can trace the Talent or seed potential through history, as the Tree of Life was nurtured in the collective unconscious.

Concurrently with the Cathedral builders, during the 11th and 12th centuries in Spain, a flowering of culture occurred as Jew, Moslem and Christian lived in harmony with one another. These communities expressed freely their traditions, which developed through the teachings of the Tree. A great Jewish teacher called Nachmanides of Cordoba consolidated the ancient Tradition. It seems that the working model of the Tree with its Ten sefiroth and Twenty-two paths emerged during this period. It was reformulated from the Biblical Merkabah (Chariot) of Ezekiel’s vision, which had been conserved in the visionary vessels of the Essenes.

The Jewish people had historically been so scattered – some felt that in order for the Tradition to survive, what had always been taught verbally should now be written down. The form we have today is the ‘Kabbalah’: ‘to receive‘ in Hebrew. ‘Qaba-Allah’: ‘the house of God‘ in Arabic.

Sacred geometry – lily and rose

By 1492 the ‘golden gathering together’ ended, as the Christians dominated Spain; the Jews and the Moslems were persecuted and thrown out of the country.

The Spanish Inquisition almost annihilated the inner knowledge, wiping out the mystical aspects of Christianity and its connections to its Judaic roots and Moslem brothers and sisters. Some who survived accepted token conversion to Christianity, in order to continue working where their roots were.

Eight path Tifareth mandala: Part the waves, kiss the lips, turn the wheel, fingers touch numbers on the clock, enter the cave, find the jewel, and climb the mountain through the rainbow.

The Tradition was taken to the Medici courts of Florence; Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were possible receivers of the knowledge. The Renaissance expanded this golden seed throughout the Arts and Sciences.

The Tree inspired creative work but remained secret in the background, from fear of persecution and the Inquisition. The golden seed and its alchemical symbolism found its way into the “Primaveras” and stone work of the great Italians.

Hermes (1992)

After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain a revival of the Tradition took place in Safed in Northern Israel. Associated with this, are the names Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria.

Some groups of Jews were welcomed by other European Jewish communities. The city of Thessalonika, in northern Greece, was under the rule of the Ottomam empire. Commenting that “Ferdinand of Spain was a fool for exiling the Jewish population”, the Sultan celebrated the culture of this displaced people who enriched his city. From this Jewish community emerged many healers and doctors who practised their art in the Sultans’ Courts.

The Sephardic Jews continued to live in Thessalonika until many centuries later, when they were decimated by the Nazi persecutions in 1942.

Solomon’s Cube, rosicrucean Emblem 6

Alchemy also became linked to the Teachings, with Moslems particularly adept in this science. Through the stimulus of Dhjabir Ibn Hayyon of Baghdad a scientific School arose. The Moors brought the alchemical chemistry to Europe. An English monk in 1144, Robert of Chester, translated works on alchemy, from the Arabic.

The conditions for this work were solitude, silence, patience, perseverence and discretion.

Alchemy became a part of the inner tradition. One exponent was Nostradamus whose prophetic writings reverberate through time; one of his later prophecies being:

“The two great masters will be friends, their great powers will be increased.
The Sun and Eagle will appear to be victorious.
Peace prosecuted by death, it shall be achieved.
In one night the Tree that has been long dead and withered shall grow green again.
After this war which would have lasted for a good while,
there shall be a renewed reign of Saturn and a Golden Age.
Here shall begin an age of Universal Peace – a Peace of 1000 years.”

This prophecy relates to the nature of the Tree; when it is seen and practiced as part of the living spiritual tradition, the feminine aspects of Binah (Saturn) will revive, and a Golden Age will flourish once more.

Chevalier Inconnu (1992)

In the 15th and 16th centuries, esoteric societies emerged through the Rosy Cross. They developed the Tradition from the root Sefira of the Tree, Malkuth. The aim was to square the circle and build heaven on earth: to balance the four elements alchemically: and to guard the Tree as a living symbol.

The early Rosicruceans, with a mystical connection to the Christ, developed discreetly in France, Germany and England. They offered a Utopia – a Hermetic alignment for scientists, intellectuals, artists and philosophers. Rene Descartes, Robert Boyle, Thomas Haydon and Thomas Vaughan all became exponents of the Rosicrucean Tradition. Elizabethan England witnessed a flowering of literature and plays. Francis Bacon, Shakespeare and Robert Flood were the main distributors of Hermetic knowledge. Further schools developed in England influencing Sir Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and William Blake. During this period, writers such as John Bunyan in Pilgrims Progress and John Milton in Paradise Lost repeated the theme of the spiritual journey: our descent and ascent of the Tree of life paths, towards symbolic discovery of the eternal city.

In Blake’s hymn Jerusalem, the second verse resonates symbolically the journey of the ascent through the Sefiroth and paths to Kether:

“Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear of clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.”

Mystics who travelled the pathways of the “Kabbalah” were known as the Merkabah riders, those who drive the chariot or vehicle to ascend to the upper worlds.

There are very interesting parallels around the Sufi teachings of Mevlana and the Mevlevis, the whirling Dervishes. The turning practice called Mukableh means “coming face to face” – an encounter with the self and God.

Dervish

The two words Merkabah and Mukableh have a resonance. The Merkabah riders have the same intention of coming face to face with God through the Tree.

The golden seed, an alchemical symbol, is perceived and cultivated in the pineal centre through yoga which means “Union”. The golden seed becomes an irresistible focus, aligning the Worlds and the centuries. It grows among groups and circles of friends in the transmission, and tends to avoid publicity and large crowds.

From the fifteenth-century Renaissance culture in Europe, the cult of the individual Master took root, as the fair art of Perspective opened up. Then the Baroque broke forth. With the loss of innocence, and focus upon sensational artistic effects, the Talent became vain. Dazzling rococo and gilt surfaces, devoid of symbol or meaning, decayed into pure decoration. Power and clarity were lost behind the fig leaf -whose guilt obscured original innocence.

In the seventeenth century, the same Talent branching into physical sciences, became an urgent quest for all roads of history to meet and rediscover wisdom.

At this crossroads, the golden seed was nurtured by a regenerated Rose Cross Fraternity in Germany, and by the masonic founding fathers of America. “Our strong child” was announced in European pamphlets such as the Fama Fraternitatis, which satyrised religious intolerance, superstition and charlatans.

aleph doodle

Telescoping the stars to earth, the New Astronomy straddled the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries with the soul’s need to re-define, verify the motions, and share the result with colleagues. A scientific community was born, inheriting from Pythagorus and from the early Renaissance a hidden truth: the Discovery always transcends – is greater than – any individual who discovers.

Discovery 1963 – painted at school

Subsequently, the Talent became channeled into a narrow band of Reason by rationalists and cynics, who “wrapped it up in a cloth”. From that confined place emerge the birth pangs of today – a multicultural crossroads, a rapidly changing global matrix. The Talent is a young bird sitting on a quantum nest of probable parables, crying “Quark!”

The shadows and distortions we experience, seem to be cast onto the screen of our life by a greater Light emerging behind them: “I am a hidden treasure, and I seek to be known.”

Our Journey into the Tree of Life, at any age or era, enquires into the soul’s origins, and with awe receives the Greater mystery – the golden Conscious seed. As we walk forth into the coming day, we may recognise and welcome these histories daily, as our own; for we are humanity. We have seen and been it all.

Part Two – the Present

See also my earlier post “Alchemy and Self-enquiry“.

Ez haim tree of life, with three granthi..

Journeying into the Tree of Life – THE GRANTHI KNOTS

THE KNIGHT (male) journeys through the mandala of the Rose (female). The Knight and the Rose symbolise our learning process from childhood. The task of the child throughout life, is to reconcile and honour his or her parents – the incarnation’s archway whose horizons expand. They, the right and left pillars of the Tree of Solomon, stand south and north. I journey through their portal, travelling from the west to the rising sun.

This is a quadriform Key to life:

“All experience is an arch where thro’
gleams that untravell’d world
whose margin fades
for ever and for ever, as I move … “
Alfred Lord Tennyson

In our shadow are rigidities of beliefs and indoctrination which devour their own tail, and become a closed circuit of births or reactive patterns of behaviour.

Arcanum 12

In alchemy, the arrow’s flight is put into reverse, and flies “upside down” into the heart of Dante’s Rose of paradise. Our attachments to “life-and-death” matters begin to drop away of their own accord. They fall out of the pockets of that powerful tarot symbol, the Hanging Man – the path of MEM, the Waters of Life. Diving into the unconscious, he smiles as he performs a cosmic headstand, treads the starry firmament, and is born again – as dew from heaven.

The personal becomes transpersonal, moving deeper into the Tree.
We reach our own interior crossroads,
where the granthi of our genetic, karmic and mental tendencies are knotted.

Kundalini Tree

In Indian Yogic culture which parallels the Tree of Life, the granthis correspond to the solar plexus, the throat, and third-eye centres. Kundalini – the Shekhinah/Shakti – has to break through these knots in the course of her journey up the spine, and free their energy potential. The first is sometimes called the knot of Brahma (creator), the second that of Vishnu (sustainer), the third that of Rudra (destroyer).

Human consciousness reaches union with its own true Self, through these three states.

The first concerns personality, ancestral and genetic codes (ahamkara).

The second addresses issues still deeply engraved in the Soul Law
from previous lives, which await resolution (buddhi and ahamkara).

At the third, (beyond chit and manas, the mind) time and space dissolve, and grace prevails.

These points of tension or conflict, seek resolution. In the Tree’s Lower Face, the cutting of the first granthi of Yesod to Tifareth, across the “Red Sea” path of Hod and Netzach, frees our spiritual heart, Tifareth, from ancestral ties which bind. After we have lived along the paths forming the Soul cup, we start to understand the nature of our second granthi, – the intersection of Tifareth centre pillar with the horizontal Path of Strength – Gevurah and Hesed. Unravelling this knot, where very deep Karmic issues adhere, releases a potential to receive the Cup of divine grace: Tifareth, Binah, Hokhmah.

Conditioned tensions in the Tree’s Lower Face melt away, as our centre of gravity shifts to the heart; to cross the Abyss “beneath the Angels’ Wings”. The great Wings of Archangel Mikael open from between the shoulder blades. “As children we shall re-enter the mystery of our Heavenly Mother and Father” .

O Angel – 1988

The Soul Law
THE INCARNATIONS of the soul are a journey to expand consciousness, truth and love – through conflict towards harmony. This is what unconditional love ultimately embraces and contains. At the second granthi, we break the deeply ingrained Soul patterns of victim, persecutor, rescuer. These obscured consciousness (Tifareth), truth (Gevurah) and love (Hesed). They lay embedded for lifetimes to resolve.

Gevurah and Hesed in the Soul triad, are the feminine and masculine pillars of our individual soul Law. The soul Law is reflected in the parental Hod and Netzach to which it gravitates for an incarnatory purpose, seeking resolution. And so, appropriating a bundle of soul memory, the personal “I” – Yesod – takes shape. The soul Law breathes into our ear a Word – the essence of why we have incarnated this lifetime.

Kundalini shakti, 1988

As we are born again and pick up this live vibration, we acknowledge in ourselves, our parents, their genetic framework, their gift to us however arduous, and our way of discovery through it. If you rest against a tall beech or oak in the woods, you can listen to the Word: the golden core within. Then you may intuit how time’s ancestral concentric rings in the wood are a plane which crosses the Tree’s height, root and breadth. These are layers of the onion. Let us reach the core of our soul Law “that I am“.

This Reality moves and flowers through all our seemingly separate births, linking and drawing them together by soul osmosis. Osmosis is the law of growth. Moisture and nitrates in the ground are drawn up through the roots as sap, towards the Sun. The sap rises through the cell membranes. As nature abhors a vaccuum, each cell as it empties, draws nourishment up into itself. This is Ascension. In the branches and leaves it photosynthesises with light, and releases life-giving oxygen.

Alchemy calls this ‘the green dragon’; a sensitive extra-terrestrial onlooker may witness the flow of renewed life over the continents, as a quiver of springtime’s emerald ray. Thus, the soul’s release into Spirit from Tifareth, begins to nourish humanity.

TOWARDS DAAT
Bearing rather than scatter the seed
whose fire liberates us,
we are the glowing lamp the Hermit holds.
We are the honey of the melting snows.

A YANTRA or sacred circle is a mandala across the stem of soul Law’s osmosis. We practice techniques such as yoga, breath work, meditation, astrology, astrocartography, déja vue, dream exploration and reincarnation regression. We enquire into our own soul Law, what it may be.

Path-working on the Tree of Life awakens the soul’s osmosis and cellular memory. Some of the jigsaw pieces fall into place. As we begin to map some coastlines of the vast interior continent, we gain compassionate access to “that untravell’d world”.

pentacle, after E.Levi

Squaring the Circle: A Yoga

CONFLICT SEEKS resolution. (See illustration below – “Mandala of the Mind’s four aspects”). Like integrating the Circle with the ellipse, we may “square our own Circle.”

squaring the circle, old illustration

There are procedures in sacred geometry for this, but in brief, we square our Circle by drawing together mind and heart organically as one, and regulating the breath. This vibrates the vagus nerve. Mind focused in the third eye centre flares like a cobra’s hood and comes to a point. It bows and dives inward. The mind immersed in the heart transcends time and space, and is the key to the opening.

Even when we know we have the key, we cannot always use it; for it comes to the hand of interior peace. By surrendering to the law of gravity which is love, we are usually guided to our roots. The deeper and higher and wider we trust and are transparent, while remaining focused in the heart centre, the simpler the opening way becomes.

Uniting Force to Formation, the Circle is squared when she becomes a garden, a landscape, an organic view of earth from within. She is seeded by Hokhmah through the door of the Queen of Nature – (the Hebrew letter for this, is DALETh).

She as Time – Binah – gives birth to Space at Hesed, over ‘the quantum abyss’ of DAAT. As in the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus:

“The father is the sun, the mother the moon.
The being is carried in the belly of the wind
and the earth is its nurse.
It is the seed of all beauty throughout the universe.
The power of it is realised when it is reduced to earth.”

Manas Mandala of the Mind’s Four Aspects (2004)

On the Mandala of the Mind

OUR THOUGHT constructs formulate our consciousness. In Indian Yoga, the mind is divided into consciousness (the seer, the observer, Chit) then all the many thoughts we have (Manas). Then the choice, the discrimination to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (Buddhi). Finally, the accumulation of conditioned memory, ego, survival concepts and belief structures (Ahankara).

If we only identify to thought in its possessive context – my work, my art, my child, my thoughts with the comparisons that this is mine, this is yours, then these thoughts will cause fragmentation and separation in time. A division occurs between the internal and the external. For what is in the present is all that can be known.

The same fracture is caused by religious beliefs. If I say ‘I am Moslem and you are a Christian”, then your beliefs and mine cause fragmentation and separation in the identification. When we empty the mind of thought, we are undivided.

sukhthai rock crysal buddha, 15th century

The “I” as sacred space takes us beyond time. In this space – the trust and transparency of the Crystal Buddha – all is Holy: all is compassion. A wise mind remains still. Time equals thought. Space is empty for the fullness. See what it is, then Be. As thinking comes to an end, we are free to love.

When freedom is not bound by thought, then that freeing is absolute. When the mind is still, that is the ending of time.

“The rest is silence.”

Hamsa Great Swan – jnana (wisdom) floats on bhakti (dedication)

How will God come today?
God came today only to be gone tomorrow
but what is in the heart of God
is also in mine

so God and I
are eternally One

P.T.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.

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All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2014. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

With the Sea Monster

Posted on May 24, 2014 by janeadamsart

Painting by Jung: the Sun-boat, or Fabulous Odyssey

Here is my favourite painting so far, in The Red Book.

The Incantation is:

“One word that was never spoken.
One light that was never lit up.
An unparalleled confusion.
And a road without end.”

The sea monster with its tremendous eye and fearsome teeth, is quintessential to the enlightenment.

This morning I am depressed. Politics is rubbish and always makes people unhappy or scooped. Idiot photo-shots. Who makes molehills out of them? Life – and the bigger picture – must go on.

The substance is YEKHIDAH the subsistent and limitless light. Oh! Where is it today? And where is the body of light? Good question! Get to work.

As I cannot find it by building it, practice remembering that it is in everything. It is in the relaxing of the inner self. And it is awake on some days, and not on others. I cannot grab the Great Work like my bottle. I am outside the book, and in the element. And the element right now is …? soft and weak. You know what? Acknowledge and respect these downsides: their present, being present.

One word that was never spoken.
One light that was never lit up.
An unparalleled confusion.
And a road without end.

What does this mean? It feels like riding along on an unopened bud. It suggests that everything is yet to find, and as yet unspoken or lit: and this is the Grail Quest through “unparalleled confusion”, opening a road without end. Inside it, I feel mundane, tired, alone and difficult, but when beheld from outside, it is a glory! It is the shared odyssey, the mythos: we all are travellers to the dawn.

You see, all things transpire.

All things are sweated into being through the pores of Siva and Parvati’s embrace. Thoughts are formed. Demons are born. The Magid – the higher Self – is somewhere near, translating through my veil into the poem – the blessing of life. I live. We live.

Siva and Parvati – Elephanta

So I am on the boat, wearing a Horus-falcon headpiece, and steering from the spinal stern.

I am on that treat of a barge: it bears buoyantly the great golden disk of the Sun – a sphere, a golden grail, the inner tuition that Light connects unbrokenly all directions – the photon – and here in my boat which I guide, is its source. Around me is the boundless sea, breaking foam as in a Japanese painting. And in the ocean’s dark indigo-aqua shadows moves swiftly with me the sea monster who impels and pulses my journey for ever and for ever. The sound of the sea is all around, and below me is the living Shadow. ADONAI Thou art God.

The Shadow’s power gives me exuberance and song. Of course it broke my heart, and continues to break it sometimes. The Shadow is yet excellent, leading and bearing my vessel the way the tritons lead the goddess through the billowing seas. I am proud of my Shadow monster and what we achieved so far. So weep no more! We are of the Fabled Ones. Look all around, at the magnificent sea !

When I talk to people of what’s past, my actual deep urge is to explain how it all became Good. I don’t know yet how to do this with economy and grace, but I will. I can cut again a mooring-rope, and travel free with the wind, and see where I was, and be where I am.

I am in the illumined picture from one unknown to another unknown. I ride the bounding sea. I dance. I ride the superb monster.

Goddess with Triton, 1957

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

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Through Earth’s Core – the Lightning

Posted on May 22, 2014 by janeadamsart

Detail: Malkuth, showing the four elements, the seed and the cross of nature

Detail: Malkuth, showing the four elements, the seed and the fertile Cross of nature – male and female intersection (vertical through horizontal).

Kabbalah 1989 tree of life painting, showing the KAV or central uniting thread – as above, so below.

In this post I reflect on our Earth-core, magnetic field and aura – some spin-off ideas. She is our real Self; the immensity of the bigger picture. Yet, approaching Her with respect begins effectively in HERE – with you and I.

Malkuth on the Tree of Life is its root: the Earth, our body and sensory spectrum, the physical universe as far as the Doppler shift. Malkuth means “Kingdom” but it also means “the Bride”. Similarly, in the I Ching or Tao, Earth-Receptive is feminine to Heaven-Creative. Through Malkuth/Earth passes our spiritual connection to all the worlds. That is why Yeshua called it “the Kingdom of Heaven”.

The thread from root to crown, and superimposing the Four Worlds of Jacobs Ladder is called in Hebrew, the KAV. It centres and earths the polarities, masculine and feminine, of the Lightning Flash.

Hokhmah, Binah, Daat are CHBD – the Hebrew chabad movement – the upper “triad of feeling” on the Tree. They form a transpersonal Vessel in the subtle body. It is uplifted through the work of our personal Yesod triad to evolve.

http://wakingtheinfinite.wordpress.com

The Bud is where Wisdom and Understanding are bridged. Their buddhic bridge is Tarot Key 3 the Empress, Venus. Pregnant in her rose garden with cypress trees and flowing water, she holds her copper dove shield. The bud is in her belly. The Bread of Life grows vigorously at her feet.

The transpersonal underpinning of Wisdom and Understanding is the non-sefira Daat. The Daat consciousness opens where the personal I closes. The Daat consciousness opens where the selfish inclination fades out. “I open where I close” – (J.K.Rowling, The Deathly Hallows.)

This implies the difficult transition, or identity shift from small-i to the Greater I … from the limitation of local desires, to the human Collective and its wellbeing. As we individuate, our “I” begins to lose its small patch, and to stand on a far wider field. The seed dies into the sprout of root and shoot.

We are pregnant cells of Adam Qadmon, the Self.

One of the Empress’s feet rests lightly on the Moon. The Moon is Yesod, the personal self, whose higher octave is Daat-Pluto, the transpersonal Reality. In the physical solar system, these two spheres are about the same size. Pluto’s 240 year orbital period is the real dark side of our Moon

An Image

Yesterday a bolt of lightning struck the Shard in London – the EU’s tallest Tower of Babel .

This small event gives food for thought. In the Tarot Key, the Lightning Flash is the Tree of Life, dismantling falsehood, cracking the chrysalis, opening the seed – the energy of Mars. That is the principle. But on the ground? That phallic spike creates around its base, chaotic wind-tunnels – aggressive gusts harry the hurriers and their headaches. Politics? – a passing show … a spiky graph nowadays.

Magnetic Field

What does the word “Gaia” mean? To me, Gaia is planet Earth’s entire connective capillary through the Solar system. Earth has a vast and tangible magnetic field, rather like a Scarab in shape. It extends roughly to Moon’s orbit, and protects us from solar bombardment: it is our nest.

Earth’s magnetic field

I saw last night a TV programme, imagining the inner core of Earth, which generates the field. They say it is as hot as the Sun’s surface. They believe it has colossal storms, just like the swirling turbulence of the giant gaseous planets. These inner-core storms are the crackling pulse of Earth’s magnetic field. I think we see them flicker in the Northern Lights – the Aurora.

Northern Lights

Their pulse travels through thousands of radial miles – concentric sheaths of crystal-forest, magma, compressed rock, biosphere and magnetic space. It travels through me, through you, through everyone unceasingly; but with our adaptation to the pressure, we don’t notice it as shock. When we begin to work with it consciously, we call it Kundalini Shakti, the Serpent Power.

Crystal forest around the core of Earth

I saw also a documentary about human beings who intercept and manifest the Voltage. They and modern science are ignorant of why or how. It is put it on display for Ooh and AAh. Unfortunately, no one asked the walking power station (no hair, no sweat glands, and his fingertips are burnt) what being a voltage-transformer actually feels like. Why not?

Earth’s magnetic fields

These are coloured threads or filaments. Our universe is a waving mass of these living filaments – our psychic energy fields, our physical patterns, our dreams. This picture reminds me of Don Juan’s teachings to Castaneda. He said the filaments are everywhere and eternal, and they assemble around human beings as egg-like forms. The “sorceror’s way” is to see and dance with these filaments, at the borders of our perception. A “sorceror” may command the position of his assemblage-point, and make it move – but only after he has renounced self-importance and embraced his death.

What is the aura? We are electro magnetic beings, in a temporary lattice of skin and bone and passing garments. The electro magnetism is the template etheric body which doesn’t alter during the lifetime: the physical body alters and replaces itself, constantly, within it. The template keeps the physical conformation stable. It is a blueprint. It has the DNA information, uniquely and intimately coded to Solomon’s lattice.

When I go into myself, and “the current” comes on, it is my electro magnetic river. This (with practice) picks up colour wavelengths to define itself as Aura. Sometimes, like the Northern Lights, the Aura is coloured, and sometimes it shows silvery white. To see the Tree in Queen Scale colours, is a way of training: to channel it. The body of Light has the spectrum embedded.

The Aura/Aurora is a feeling, a sensation. When I was learning astrology, about 25 years ago, I saw and dreamed each night of abstract lines and cylinders in colour, which moved among each other, forming patterns. This faculty afflicts my worldish thoughts and makes them rather tough, like yarrow.

The Aurora/earth core is the sensual consciousness… when standing still. Inside Earth, the magma sphere is about the size of Mars. Within that, the molten core is about the size of our Moon.

The nesting shapes of Earth, Mars and Moon suggest what? … a profound resonance with human friction on the surface? Within our planet IS the galactic core, for it has the thermal power of Suns. Some veins in the magnetosphere allow the fire to bleed up into volcanic vents and patterns, and to form the rocky crust, cooled by oceans. (See Jung’s painting of the serpent fountain tree, at the bottom of this post.)

The Hermetic Table teaches: Veni Interiore Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem. Journey into Earth’s Centre to put your life in balance and find the secret Stone. Meditation and yoga is a simple into-the-planet journey – whichever way it forms itself.

Emerald Table of Hermes

Kundalini is the planetary magnetic current: receptivity to it. Let the snake uncoil. On land, they can dig and investigate to about a kilometre below the surface, before it gets too hot. But the ocean depth is nearly ten times that: ten kilometres deep – and down there, supposedly, there is vast dark pressure, but not as heat?

So I picture the thermal mountain ranges through every direction under Earth’s crust, and how these peak under the continents and under every dot and atoll of land: a spiky graph.

Over South America and Southern Ocean, there is a slowly growing area (over the last 400 years) of weakening magnetic field. It is like an ozone hole. The Hubble telescope satellite’s instruments turned erratic whenever it orbited over this region. From Earth’s core the stormy pulses display an altered intensity at this point: in space the magnetic shield overlying South America is thinner than over any other part of the globe.

The Hubble satellite becomes deranged in the borderline “pocket” because it is exposed to cosmic and solar “hammers”. It crosses a space where it is not protected. So its minders devised a solution: they switch off the instruments when it approaches the “hole”, then switch them back on again when it is safe. All around the weakening field, drift bubbles or islets in which earth’s north-south polarity flickers or inverts itself. As these merge together, the tendency may coalesce. It is believed that within one to ten thousand years, the poles of Earth will flip – with an immense and inconceivable juddering of the Great Scarab until it settles the other way round.

400 years – the time period of the anomaly so far – roughly approaches the 17th century date when the Aquarian Age is said to have commenced. Observe, as the magnetic hold weakens over Argentina, humanity’s materialistic acceleration: the “Age of enlightenment” and consequent consumption and compromise of the biosphere to its use. Observe climate change and ecological damage as phenomena which include the blind human error, but also vastly precede it, in the way of cycles, and make the error inevitable. If the error is inevitable, so is the eventual coming into balance. Nature is equilibrium, a fluid pendulum. The cosmic Tree sways from side to side.

Sage and Osmosis 1987

Our responsibility to what is given us to garden, should recognise the scale in which the problem occurs. It is not ourselves exclusively. That attitude magnifies the personal ego and its limitation – “mea culpa” does not evolve.

The human challenge offers a greater scale, because we must learn to adapt ourselves to the interplay of cosmic force-fields which appear to speed up and liberate a geological process in this planet.

There is a mass of disturbance and disease. We should lay aside the notion of enmity – in ourselves and to others, and in Nature. When we talk of “our planet”, we mean the thin rocky crust – our habitation and all we know. The rest, we infer by analogy (explosive experiments, lenses and graphs.) We do not know the rest of it, truly, until we look within ourselves, for we are unlimitedly, THAT. But our knowledge is incomplete.

Sacred India Tarot – Buddha’s Mahasamadhi

We know not more than a cross-section sliver of the truth, until an awareness grows, that the Solar System is not a flat plate, it has the whole shape of an egg: the solar nucleus is wrapped in spherical planes which are particle-waves. The greater part of the planetary orbits – that which is above and below what we map – is invisible to our sensory spectrum; yet its complete perception informs our being.

On Parables

The PARABOLA is a section across a cone. Spacetime diagrams describe the speed of light as a cone flaring from a point. The speed of light is a constant, whatever position or motion impacts it. Time and space draw an ascending and descending parabola through the “cone” and they are relative. Our experience and physicality is a cross sectional curve.

To plot an orbit’s curve, is to state its parable. Appearances are a conditioned imprint on the retina and the mind. They are an analogy only – for when Reality enters, predictions based on past experience and conjecture fly out of the window!

The soul Law resolves deep patterns within the self, while appearing to the world as a contribution to knowledge and society (such as Johannes Kepler’s work with the elliptical orbit of Mars, and with his Planetary Laws on which Newton would base his science of gravity. The orbit of a Keplerian planet is not a linear particle travelling around a globe, but a wave of spacetime, standing out from its source.)

An ensouled view that each visible orbit around the Sun could be a section through an oval sphere or egg – a living organism – enhances our life. We have to work at it, against the habitual. It opens the doors of perception.

Conventional physical science views the solar system on a two-dimensional plane of rings, like a section across a tree’s stem. A tree cut across presents a concentric plane of rings. However, our imagination embraces the vertical reality intersecting this plane – its shape and centuries of growth. We reflect on the seasons of its leaves and nestings. We hear the song of birds, the hosts that populate its limbs. We sense the roots underground holding the earth’s integrity like a gardener’s hand. We imagine the oak within the acorn, and even the geological curve from which it springs. Then we realise we have, in any of our brief time-frames, only a fragmentary view of the evolution of our soul; and likewise the Solar System and the affairs of our world.

To work with the Tree of Life helps to “raise the level” and to overcome the persuasion of being world-helpless. Raised up we see a little further, and attend a little better to what is real.

Each Sefira of the Tree represents a planetary vibration, resonating human-ness. The planetary positions echo the concealed “real wave” of the orbital aura enwrapping the Sun. So I can measure the slice across the egg and get excited, but I can know the egg only by holding, warming and eating it.

Savitri the Mother of the Sun

Cultivating this awareness, flat-earth-theory human evolves to “standing human”, and begins to care for all its kind. The Rebbe Yakov of Prague used to say, that in an almond tree a few buds only will open at first: but in the whole tree, all are destined to open. The psychology changes. The human challenge is to keep awake. This is difficult, but a tiny few can, and maintain a steady proportion throughout our history.

Yeshua “healed the blind”. The human challenge is to open our eyes, keeping bedrock values open and enduring.

This is hard, when put to sleep by today’s communication technologies and the entertainment industry. The monkey mind is on overdrive addiction and stress – a symptom of subterranean acceleration. I am, we are, part and parcel of the acceleration, and our difficulty is to be conscious agents in the swelling wave. Am I in harmony with it, or do I damage my environment? How does a conscious agent, a particle in the wave, choose, from moment to moment, the hour? Nothing is in isolation. Each event essentially, each individual challenge, transmits metanoia – the turning towards the cosmic Divine Pulse. This is the teacher of history.

To conclude for the moment: this painting (below) is in Jung/Philemon’s series of paintings and Incantations celebrating the primordial Mystery of the Christ child’s birth:

“Set the egg before you,
the God in his beginning,
and behold it,
and incubate it with the magical warmth of your gaze.”

Serpent lava fountain Tree - in Jung's Red Book

Serpent lava fountain Tree – Painting by C.G.Jung in The Red Book

The Incantation here is:

Amen, you are the lord of the beginning.
Amen, you are the star of the East.
Amen, you are the flower that blooms over everything.

Amen, you are the deer that breaks out of the forest.
Amen, you are the song that sounds far over the water.
Amen, you are the beginning and the end.

The Red Book

Yantra Tree

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

aquariel link

On Death and the Fire-Bird of Peace

Posted on May 2, 2014 by janeadamsart

The Grand Cross easing, opens up for me – I discover, and so do others – into unimagined joys: as in a conversation, the other day.

This morning there is white mist, I feel rather damp and warm, the eclipse has passed and I feel better, and now blessed – a difficult easter it was. Up at 6 again, even after a long layabed. Bells ring inside – angelus bells, Liszt’s Angelus, bluebells. The birds are busy and the morning is quiet. Adonai, thou art God.

A companion came here last week, wanting to talk. So he sat down and did. He spoke for a long time and explored, about Death. (How harmonised this is, with all the themes of eclipse just now).

You played your inner keyboard, like a jazz musician improvises – death as the existential support of Life. Not only the violent and tragic deaths, whose martyrs empower survivors; but death as the Now, facing that we die. Each moment we die to ourselves, extends life. Life is aware and has no limit.

The only way I can recall what you said is to re-enter my inner ear, this morning, and let a kind of translation happen.

Sacred India Tarot, 13, Yama the Lord of Death. For all these meanings and their release, read KATHA UPANISHAD – the dialogue of young Nachiketas with Yama, who gave him infinity.

Time, through day and night, is full of tensions, obstacles, fears, and getting stuck. Each of these is death – a broken continuity: a cut off point, having to deal with a bill, a loss, or a shock. Or a sudden hurry. Or looking for a letter. Or stress. Or dislocation and fear before sleep – the lift-shaft drops and jolts. Each time I am absorbed into a fuss, I am clouded over, darkened, and I die. When I am on autopilot I am dead. Most of us walk around churning the grey stuff, as the living dead.

(Yet the neighbour greets; and we smile, the sun comes through.)

But when I truly die, I open my eyes and there is no die. No dying, ever. My awareness is not linear, which is the place where we believe in death and stoppages. My awareness is circular, concentric, a sphere, it is without end, like a wave of sound: Now. Now. Now. What dies in the spreading of the sound? The player perhaps. In conscious dying I am every … where without end. This is so, even in the moment before my body dies, the moment before the silver thread breaks.

There is nothing but awareness of life, in death. This is the secret of the Self realised sages and the empty Fullness. They are not on autopilot, nor do they serve time. They are time and space. They flower, they are ever dying and opening.

The skeleton moving through Key 13 scorpios is the common ground of us all – our bones. Death and sexuality pass through each other, because the fertile seed dies to become a tree. Death and sexuality are simultaneous, as One. Most human trouble arises through separating them. But sexual feelings are enhanced by death. Wars increase population: the survival instinct. What is the survival instinct, beyond propagation? Life, the fact of life, the shine and shrine of life, the inescapable enigma of life with the equally inescapable death: the circling of day and night, the Sun around our Earth.

People are deeply afraid that they won’t exist. When this is severe, they are sometimes helped by being reminded that their actions rippled through other lives (persons) in small consequential changes – the butterfly wing effect continues. People are deeply afraid that they DON’T EXIST, and therefore have no meaning. I am afraid I don’t exist in your eyes; this is fear of death? The pulse of Life insists on cognition and to create. It only has the cognition.

But in my death, EVERYTHING ELSE IS ALIVE! So what am I?

Fishes, 1988

The automatic reactive mind (the Tree’s feeling-triad, self-image, think and feel) scampers into past and future mode, because when I am quiet, when I am NOW, it dies, and is no longer important. Human mind-life is a running rabbit. We are creatures of the mind. But when we come into our embodied centre of gravity, we die and we are limitless. I AM.

Ramana and Rabbit

Most persons believe the embodied awareness – physical consciousness – is around what we do to our bodies, in terms of consuming, exercise, stress, or sloth. But that is the mind being identified to a Thing. That unconscious attitude drives our body to the grave, as if it is inert and must be chivvied or controlled like a car.

Whereas the embodied spiritual conscience – Malkuth on the Tree (the root) – awakes, respects, and listens to our living, moving earth-body from head to toe, hears and is the cord of gravity, the DNA connection to the stars and – through heart and belly and bum on seat – to souls.

This conscience is not bothered by diets, exercise, management or medical propaganda. Sufficient is supplied by nature. All I do is dance. I think the root of disease is : if I subconsciously fear my physical texture as an enemy – but that is just my view. As consciousness, I embody it, right into my toes and fingers. At any agreed moment I am the fields, the limitless horizon, the halls of wisdom – but only when I am not locked in a pain-box, a worrybox! That is when I play dead for a time. Today I am free.

Action. What is action? What is right action?

Line-dance, January 1988

Always there is movement. A rock, a stone, is an intensity of sub atomic vibration, and it mutates through geological pulse. Rabbit runs or freezes in the road!

Movement is a book of changes, through the empty capacity which is always full. The movement is the acceptance of tides of pain through the sea which is free and constantly adapts: the waves break onto the beach. I am physically not other than the beach, the landscape, the hills, the sea, as I breathe in and out.

My mental life is an imagined and consolidated entity … for a while … considering itself immortal, and fearing the opposite. But I can choose, at any moment, to imagine and be Gaia, the planet. What separates planet Gaia from her encircling magnetic field, the Sun, the solar system’s electron orbits, the far constellations?

Yet, how often do I stop my merry-go-round and step into the open point?

“Discovery” – painted at school in 1963

What is right action? All too often, “right action” is mentally induced, and is disempowered. Right action waits to be fully informed ; for the wave to form and grow and carry it through. In the Buddha nature, right action surrenders. Seldom do I have the patience.

But sitting still when something is happening that I love: this is home. And then it acts.

Self enquiry: who acts? Who does? Who dies?

The sage Ramana Maharshi & Arunachala Children

The imagined, personal I is most often in the way. But if you sing, it gets up and dances, and then it is no longer worried about itself. You are not a bounded person, but as the universe. You where you come from, are not outlined.

Life – existentially – is the flow unbroken. When you are not there, it is anger and death for a moment. Continuity and flow are reciprocal, relying on contact and response. As things are in the human arrangement, we deal constantly with interruptions and hiatus. Such are the many towered citadels our beliefs built up. Rabbit scurries in and out of the towers. Rabbit wanted that, so there it is. One day, rabbit wants and materialises and eats a different landscape. It is all of the mind. Human habitations, even centuries long, are ephemeral compared with Reality.

Everything we see is an end-product or effect. Believing in that effect as permanent, harnesses us to existential death-and-decay – and fear. We all have it. It is hard wired into our sense of safety. It is in our blood.

But in our blood also, is the edgeless freedom to be.

Then I am free to be the sharpness of sorrow and the fear of death and the anxiety & panic of life, and the trying to act in the right way … equally as the bliss of being, the purity of loving.

Getting lost into any of those, singly, I suppose, is death as it conventionally appears.

Conscious death is an everlasting dying moment. Conscious death passes into infinity. At the other side of this way of birth, there seems to be a re-formulation into “Am”; only the locus of memory which clustered and entangled that stream of life, is gone, it is a coat taken off. I think the “Am” looks and sees what the life-strand was – its principle pattern and detail – without the personal memory which flavoured and “determined” it – i.e. was born, got married, gave birth and died. The “Am” sees and is the whole floating carpet, not just the one thread.

As I sit still and look, I practice this “Am”, for when I die.

I think this is important. The quality of dying reverberates back into, influences and tinctures the whole of life. Dying is a daily and profoundly fertile practice.

And the word “UNCONDITIONAL” was mentioned: open sesame.

Where rivers cross – as in a Grand Planetary Cross – there is some turbulence: then the flow continues.

It develops as a conversation, an open sesame. Back and forth, and the “sesame” or open-ness between, is the shared discarnate Teacher, the magid – the living field where we connect.

My “death” yesterday morning delivered itself, and I no longer needed to talk about it. I can’t remember today, what it was. Swim deep, little fish. To listen and to wait, is to meet, and to unfold. You are not limited.

Yin Yang peach

Red Book, Liber Secundus, heading for Chapter 7 – like a Tao symbol

Interlude – More Red Book

Jung went into that flowery wooded landscape and met the Red Devil Rider and the Hermit Ammonius, both aged and totally changed and grey! They looked at him with horror. He looked down at himself and saw he is covered with green leaves. He has become the Green Man. They called him, “Damned pagan riffraff!”

Sacred India Tarot Buddha Knight of Disks: the Green Man

What a terror early Christianity had, as a jewel – terror of its old gold setting. The jewel was frightened of the ring.

It insisted on its own tale of death and resurrection, and would blot out every other version if it could. The decaying and superstitious pair of old glamours blame Jung for his ancient curiousity, for leading them astray. Ammonius Sacca told him, “Your remark that I probably needed the closeness of men to arrive at the higher mysteries stunned me like infernal poison. Soon thereafter I called the brothers of the valley together and announced to them that a messenger of God had appeared to me – so terribly had you blinded me – and commanded me to form a monastery with the brothers.”

And so it became organised – a religion. The holy brothers built their monastery where they could see the ships passing by, and they got intoxicated and muddled with the world.

It is very funny. Ammonius persuaded himself to go to Alexandria to see his bishop, but once there he got pulled into life and got on a boat to Italy, drank wine, wallowed in pleasure and turned into an animal. When he got to Naples, there on the shore stood the Red Devil – alack, alack, the evil one.

The Red Devil said “Be silent, old fool. If I had not been present you would have become an outright pig. When you saw me, you finally pulled yourself together, cursed the drinking and the women, and returned to the monastery. Now hear my story, damned hobgoblin …”

I guess from this point, religion and all its prejudices and scapegoats got Organised.

The Red Devil’s story was that Jung introduced him to dancing. So he joined a monastery, fasted, prayed and converted himself.

“In my blindness I wanted to reform the Church liturgy, and with the bishop’s approval I introduced dancing. I became Abbot and as such, alone had the sole right to dance before the altar, like David before the Arc of the Covenant. But little by little the brothers also began to dance; indeed, even the congregation of the faithful and finally the whole city danced.

“It was terrible. I fled into solitude and danced all day until I dropped, but in the morning the hellish dance began again.”

Now I remember more. The phoenix, the ashes, and death. The ashes are sorrow and loss. The renewal takes wing and sings and survives as Life through Death. Without Death there is no Life.

Re Death: see the Katha Upanishad, Juan Mascaro’s translation – the dialogue between Yama and young Nachiketas. And their picture in the Sacred India Tarot.

Meanings convert fluidly into new versions. To get stuck in one version is to die, and to deny the river. When I am stuck in a version, I try to convert others to it – like old religions did. Some of the early Xians were consumed in their Mystery and its meaning. Their brief was to change the world. During the middle ages, that belief gained power, wealth, palaces and prisoners. It stamped furiously on all heresies and Gnostics.

But Yeshua was Gnostic. He knew.